Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant’s annual magazine.

This issue highlights:

• Swimming Safer: Sharing knowledge, data, and resources
• IISG interns can have invaluable real world experience
• Spelling out nature’s benefits helps inform land use decisions
• Largemouth bass in the busy Chicago River are seeking out natural areas
• Educators explore water quality along the Wild Mile
• We’re funding new research to address emerging coastal issues

Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant’s annual magazine.

To assist green infrastructure project managers with understanding long-term maintenance issues, Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant conducted a needs assessment. This assessment grew out of a recognition that declining infrastructure performance and sufficiency is a fundamental challenge to stormwater management over time.

The Helm is a collection of recent IISG success stories, describing some of our research, outreach, and education efforts to address coastal and Great Lakes issues in Illinois and Indiana.

Through the decision support system, Tipping Point Planner (tippingpointplanner.org), communities in Great Lakes states can plan for a sustainable future by directly linking data to the local decision-making process. With help from trained facilitators, Tipping Point Planner enables professional as well as citizen participation in the land use planning and management process, including maintaining projects using a HUC 12 watershed scale. The program provides information, tools, and resources to help communities work with diverse stakeholders to:

• Examine past and predicted land-use changes
• Identify environmental threats
• Define natural resource assets in need of protection or restoration
• Explore land-use strategies and policies that enhance local values
• Gain the framework to define a community’s priorities through interactive community visioning exercises

The curriculum contains education materials and resources to support community planning for land use and natural resource management. The following curriculum chapters are available for download:

• Tipping Point Planner Introduction
• Planning Tools for Land Use and Natural Resource Management
• Tipping Point Planner Modules

To learn more about facilitated community action planning program offerings, please visit www.purdue.edu/fnr/extension/scep/programs/tipping-point-planner

To download this resource visit the Purdue Extension EdStore at https://mdc.itap.purdue.edu/item.asp?Item_Number=ID-514-TPP.

This report represents an important first step in quantifying the extent of the water affordability problem in northeastern Illinois, and exploring strategies for tackling this growing challenge.

This publication brings together program impacts from the 2018-2019 Sea Grant year.

Concern over water service affordability has grown in recent years as water bills escalate at a faster pace than the overall cost-of-living.While the cost of water has been rising over the past decade, the ability of consumers to pay for water service has declined. This review examines the definition and measurement of water affordability through a chronological search and presentation of the regulatory and research literature. Results will be used to determine a method for measuring water affordability for the northeastern Illinois region.

This document provides a review of policies and programs addressing water bill affordability issues and equitable access to water. Five broad strategies are discussed, including: cost reduction, water efficiency, rate design, customer assistance programs, and hard to reach programs. For each solution, a definition, implementation considerations, examples, and potential recommendations are provided. More extensive case studies from a handful of water systems and a brief summary of the literature reviewed is also included. Results will be used to inform a community water affordability technical assistance program.